Intelligent capture

Drive value from your automation strategy with intelligent capture

Intelligent capture is the critical first step in an end-to-end automation strategy. The concept of intelligent captures goes beyond basic data extraction and classification and also validates the data, speeds process completion, cuts costs, reduces human error and allows for a truly paperless workplace.

When combined with other digital transformation efforts, digital capture kicks off other automation processes. It helps you collect, organize and process information the moment it arrives. It doesn’t stop at just reading the data on a document — it employs advanced technology to drive higher accuracy through:

• Document classification
• Data extraction
• Validation processes

Intelligent capture can deploy these tools regardless of whether documents come in digitally, typed or handwritten.

7 ways intelligent capture optimizes your automation strategy

1. Cuts labor costs and maximizes human capital

The energy and potential of your staff is being wasted if it’s spent on manual tasks and tedious routines like reading and keying in invoices, orders, remittances and other documents. Reducing manual tasks is a key driver of productivity and can lead to a more engaged and fulfilled workforce.

> Read more | Intelligent automation 101 

2. Reduces cycle time

An intelligent capture solution:

• Recognizes and sorts documents quickly, even in new formats, by reading document content
• Extracts and interprets document data
• Validates data faster than any human
• Eliminates bottlenecks in manual workflows and physical document handling
• Enables the instant transfer of extracted information into content management, ERPs and other business systems where it can be searched, analyzed, acted on and synchronized with existing data elements

3. Improves accuracy

Intelligent capture solutions are engineered with AI that identifies and contextualizes a wide variety of documents, regardless of size, format, language, symbols used and image quality.

> Read more | The intelligent capture journey in Hyland’s Brainware solution  

4. Supports scaling content volume

Intelligent capture is extremely scalable, with the ability to easily expand when incoming information increases. Rather than bogging down staff, intelligent capture systems learn more and efficiently process through new and additional volumes of documents.

5. Works with digital and analog systems

Modern supply chains and data flows don’t just work with paper-based intakes, but with a diversity of electronic file types. With multichannel intelligent capture solutions, virtually any file format is interpretable.

6. Enhances ROI

The ROI of intelligent capture technologies is 12 to 18 months, although some customers reach the milestone sooner.

7. Makes an immediate impact

Intelligent capture solutions process unstructured documents without templates, keywords, exact definitions, taxonomies or indexing. Following a short installation and configuration period with a limited number of good sample documents, systems are ready for user acceptance testing, followed by actual work — and all the benefits previously mentioned.

How to overcome unstructured information

Unstructured information causes data disorganization and confusion. Intelligent capture can bring order to the chaos — but before you conquer your chaos, you must first understand and address it.

Address the chaos

Information fuels your business — and access to that information is key.

Is your access impeded by physical file cabinets, unorganized network file shares and workers in the field with no means to upload new information? If so, take a step back, assess the information clutter and start building a strategy that allows your organization to capture all the scattered information into one, central content management system — where and when you need to.

The answers to these four questions can tell you where your organization lands on the information capture spectrum:

1. Are you receiving important information on paper?

2. Do you have information scattered across disconnected, electronic silos?

3. Is information stuck in the hands of mobile employees?

4. Do you have staff devoted to document sorting and data entry?

Any “yes” answers indicate your information access is lagging. Take our free self-assessment  for immediate and actionable feedback on how to get your digital transformation back on track.

Conquer the chaos

For many organizations, the volume, velocity and variety of information needed to manage, store and protect content has outpaced the legacy systems that used to do it.

Experts recommend three strategies to conquer information chaos:

1. Focus capture efforts at the point of origination
Long a business objective, fully executing on this strategy is more possible — and more accurate — than ever, thanks to the growing integration of AI tools like machine learning and natural language processing.

2. Measure, measure, measure
Elevate the strategic importance of intelligent capture by committing to clear and meaning process metrics.

3. Keep the endgame in mind
Processing your information is just the first step in a strategic journey. The endgame is when the data and information that is processed can be used to quickly and accurately initiate or drive core business processes and decision-making.

Intelligent capture and OCR

Optical character recognition (OCR) technology recognizes printed or written text from a scanned document or image file. OCR solutions are part of the data capture process and reduce the need for manual document sorting and data entry.

Intelligent capture takes data extraction to the next level, using the power of automation to digitize content entry and streamline downstream business processes organization-wide.